If I remember correctly, The Founders originally considered making land ownership a requirement for voting. The idea was that if you had nothing to lose, it was easier to vote for laws that took something away from someone else and have it given to you. This is not the route they took however, but their fear was justified nonetheless.
If you pay no federal income tax then you have no “skin in the game” and all the debate about raising taxes and who should pay how much is just white noise for you. All you care about is that you pay no federal income tax, and if you vote to support politicians that will raise incomes taxes on others, you stand to gain a slice of that pie, increasing your own income through government tax credits, which are just checks the government writes to people from money they took from someone else that earned it.
In bouncing around the internet looking up this magical 46.4% figure, I ran across a couple Liberal blogs excoriating conservatives, Tea Partiers, Republicans, Constitutionalists, Libertarians, etc… claiming this figure is all a lie. The comments section on these blogs was the usual left-wing vitriolic venom of how anyone claiming that this number is true hates poor people, the elderly and runs over dogs on purpose.
In these blogs, I noticed how carefully they worded their argument against this 46.4% fact. Yes, I said FACT. If you read slowly and pay attention, you will notice that after they say how ridiculous this notion is, that 46.4% of Americans pay no taxes (notice the word “income” is missing in front of tax), they point out that almost everyone pays federal taxes (notice the word “federal” is added in front of tax).
The word manipulation is a trick to confuse what is being argued.
With just a few more Google searches, I now see how the Socialists are carefully framing their argument. When someone says that 46.4% of Americans don’t pay taxes, the Socialists retort that is a lie and that they absolutely due pay taxes, in fact 81.9% of Americans pay federal taxes! And this is true. 81.9% of Americans DO indeed pay federal taxes. But do you see the word twisting that Liberals have to use to make this work?
I’ll show you…
When a “normal” person, not a rabid mouth-foaming Liberal, says that 46.4% of Americans don’t pay taxes. A normal person means federal income taxes. These are the taxes every true-blooded American Patriot tries reduce as much as possible every April by scouring for receipts into the wee hours of the morning to claim deductions. These are the taxes that take the lion’s share of our earnings. These are the punishment taxes that increase as our hard work and diligent efforts increase. These are the taxes the IRS will come knocking on your door for with handcuffs in one hand and a tazer in the other. So these taxes, federal income taxes, are what a normal person cares about when they talk about people having “no skin in the game” by not paying any “taxes.”
Liberals simply try to manipulate the numbers and the wording, to counter this argument, hoping some vocabulary-slight-of-hand will confuse you and catch you off guard by adding in the payroll taxes (as opposed to income taxes) that Americans pay. By payroll tax, they are referring to Social Security, Medicare, etc… which are taken out of everyone’s paycheck. A normal person is not referring to these taxes as they are not what we fear and loathe on April 15 and everyone knows that everyone pays them, there is nothing anyone can do to reduce them or avoid them or get deductions for them, and that they are a very small inconsequential amount of what we pay, so payroll taxes are not the issue! But in order for Liberals to win their argument, they have to change the issue to one they can win, namely that 81.9% of Americans pay federal taxes, which is not the same thing!
If you add payroll taxes to income taxes to get federal taxes, this is what you get:
- 46.4% of Americans pay no income tax. The opposite of this is obviously that 53.6% DO pay income tax.
- 28.3% of the 46.4% that don’t pay income taxes DO pay payroll tax.
- So Liberals will add together the amount of Americans that DO pay income tax (53.6%), and DO pay payroll tax (28.3%), and say that 81.9% of Americans DO pay Federal Taxes.
So suddenly the argument is about how almost 82% of Americans do pay federal taxes, so the conservatives are all liars, and we should burn them at the stake and bury them with all the dogs they ran over.
But none of this changes the fact…………..that 46.4% of Americans PAY NO INCOME TAX.
Nice try you sneaky Liberal Rabbits! BUT TRICKS ARE FOR KIDS!
Amusingly, the Liberal blogs cited the White House’s website as their source, which cited the Tax Policy Center as their source. Both sources try to confuse the reader by manipulating the wording as I described above. The fact however remains…46.4% of Americans pay no income tax. Period.
When almost half of the population does not pay federal income tax, do you think any of them would have any problem raising the federal income tax on the other half of the population, if that meant more tax credits, more medicare, more social security, more subsidized housing, more free healthcare, more, more, more, for them?
This is the goal of Big Government, to reach a tipping point, where more of the population is receiving some form of government aid, subsidy, paycheck or contract, than is not. The part of the population that is not…you and me…are forced to support the other half which the other half makes sure of by voting in politicians that will guarantee it.
That is the goal of any Big Government, just like the one we have now.
Categories: Liberal Media, Socialism, Taxes
Angrywoodchuck's Blog 
Except that the meme that conservatives (including Romney promote) is that 47% of Americans “pay no taxes”. They never parse their words as you are trying to do by saying “no federal income taxes”. They make it sound as if 1/2 the country pays nothing at all. This is simply not true. The ones doing the word manipulation are conservatives.
Ah. The “meme” rebuttal. You guys LOVE that word.
Do you mean the same “meme” the Democrats use when they retort the conservative “meme” by saying, “It’s simply not true that half the country pay no taxes” – usually followed with something really pot-stirring like, “That is an outright lie, and an outrageous contempt for the American people.”
I have never heard a conservative leave off the word “federal” but I am not going to say it has never happened, either intentionally or by accident. The truth is, the statement is just as damaging with the word federal in it, so there is no good reason for them to leave it off. However, the Democrats can not rebuttal without making sure, on purpose, every single time, to leave off the word “federal.”
Because…
Despite the weakness of a “meme” argument, the truth, the fact, still shines as bright as a sunrise…almost half of Americans pay no federal income tax – and two memes don’t make that right.